Appendix A: Letter on Goddard Patents

In early 1975 a West Point cadet wrote von Braun asking about the persistent accusation that he and his team in Germany basically copied the patents and work of American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard and performed little original engineering in developing the V-2. Von Braun, who was not in good health, chose to respond in detail to the young engineering student’s apparently sincere question.

Around 1930, when I was eighteen years old and a member of the German Society for Spaceflight . . . Dr. Robert Goddard was one of the great international names in the concept of flight through space, and I counted him among my boyhood heroes. I had read his booklet “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes” which described the multistage principle and presented some advanced ideas on how to improve the performance of solid fuel rockets. In subsequent years, when I developed liquid rockets for the German Ordnance Corps which ultimately led to the V-2, I occasionally saw illustrations (e.g., a Goddard proposed aerial torpedo), or statements (e.g., Goddard says: “Man can reach the moon.”) in aviation journals. However, at no time in Germany did I or any of my associates ever see a Goddard patent. I was not even aware of the fact that Goddard worked in the field so dear to my own heart, namely liquid-propellant rockets, let alone that even as early as 1926 he had successfully launched the world’s first liquid-propellant rocket.¹

Von Braun, who had arrived in America only weeks after Goddard’s death, stated in his letter how, in 1950, the army had asked him to review and analyze “a large stack of Goddard patents” related to a lawsuit filed against the government by the Goddard estate and the Guggenheim Foundation, an early sponsor of Goddard’s work. The main contention was that the V-2s brought to America and some of the new postwar U.S. rockets infringed on the reclusive American rocket innovator’s patents, and so the government should pay royalties to his estate.² Von Braun further noted in his letter to the cadet:

The government lawyers apparently took the position that at least the V-2 design could not possibly have violated Goddard patents, because they had been highly classified and had, therefore, not been available to the German engineers. Moreover, even if any infringement existed, the United States would automatically have acquired all rights to the V-2 technology by virtue of the captured V-2 missile falling in the category of war booty under international law.

Von Braun wrote that he was asked to do “a detailed written assessment” for use by the court, regarding whether any V-2 engineering designs had infringed on Goddard patents. He stated that he could certify “there were indeed infringements all over the place”—from the application concepts of jet vanes to turbo-pumps to guidance-and-control gyroscopes. Von Braun added in his letter:

All the Goddard patents I saw were classified and had never been published, even as late as 1950. I was fully unaware of them while in Germany, and even in the United States I saw them for the first time only five years after my arrival, and upon receipt of a secret clearance.

All the patents I reviewed in 1950 rendered impressive proof that Dr. Goddard had indeed a brilliant and imaginative mind. The patents covered not only design features actually (but unwittingly) used in the V-2, but numerous alternate options.

The ailing von Braun concluded to the West Pointer: “It might be of interest that (maybe in part as a result of my affirmative report) the lawsuit led to an amicable settlement, under which the U.S. Government paid a generous sum to the Goddard estate and Guggenheim Foundation.”3

In March 1957 von Braun had been invited to address a banquet of the Worcester Engineering Society in the Massachusetts community where Goddard had begun his pioneering work. He asked to be taken—by Goddard’s widow and test flight camera operator, Esther—to the site of the launching of history’s first liquid-propelled rocket by the visionary physics teacher thirty-one years earlier, on March 16, 1926. Finding no historical marker there, von Braun began a campaign that evening to erect a proper one. His efforts, through the American Rocket Society, succeeded with the 1960 dedication of a memorial at the site.⁴ Other honors in Goddard’s memory followed, often with von Braun’s involvement.